Linker Script - Placing a section at the end of a memory region

Question

I have searched far and wide for how to do this and have failed to come up with an answer.

My memory layout is as follows:

Fake Address | Section
            


        

Answer 1

I was able to accomplish something similar by making linking a two-step process. First I compile the section in question to its own object file. In my case I had a metadata section generated from an assembly file. gcc -c will compile the source into object files, but not link them.

gcc -c  metadata.s  -o metadata.o

You could also build your whole program, then extract just the section in question with objcopy.

gcc -c  main.cc  -o main.o
objcopy --only-section=.metadata  main.o  metadata.o

Now I build and link the rest of the program, and include the object file among the linker's input.

gcc metadata.o  ../main.o  -o Program.elf  -T linkerscript.ld   

The linker reads the section .metadata from the object file, and I can reference its size in the linker script.